In Dreams
by Conigliomannaro
Summary: There is a promise to keep, a new life to meet in; but sometimes things just don't work out how they should, and two lovers can chase each other through eternity without ever finding themselves. How long 'til you can keep your promise, Roxas?


Hello ff . net, long time no see.

This is a commission I wrote for a friend at livejournal for the Somalia Famine Relief project. Before you go ahead and read the story, I need to put something down real clear: although this is a AxelRoxasAxel story, there are a few pieces in which Axel is a girl, or Roxas is a woman, or even both. So, technically, this story is both het and slash.

The reason why I did this is because Rae had asked me a missed connections story, in which Roxas and Axel chase themselves through their next lives, and I figured it'd be statistically improbable for them to always be born as males over and over again. It's still them, their characterization is still pretty much my usual one, but I needed to put here some warning because last time I posted something het here I got a persistent reader trying to bite my head off.

The speech about time is clearly influenced by Doctor Who, episode 3x10, Don't blink.

I hope some of you like this. Leave me a couple words if you wish. Also I would like to answer to LazyAnon's review on The Little Prince. YOU. YOU ARE THE MOST ADORABLE THING I HAVE EVER ENCOUNTERED IN THE LANDS OF FF . NET AND I LOVE YOU DEARLY. Seriously your review has made me smile so bad, I was really sad I couldn't answer you. So. I figured you'd read this story too, and decided to answer you here. Thank you. Lots.

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><p>There are memories of wavering dreams, scattered frames of a story Sora doesn't remember living, and confused feelings of disconnection accompanying his last heartbeats. Kairi's wrinkly hand is squeezing his, her tears making no sound as they run down her sagging cheeks; Sora wishes he could tell her that it's okay, that it doesn't hurt and that it's time, but the breath seems to never be enough; articulating words has never been this hard, especially for him, who never kept his mouth shut back in the day.<p>

He turns his head, smiles under the oxygen mask at his wife, and hopes that somehow she can see it. Like the doctor said, it's become harder to breathe, but it doesn't feel like choking; it's just a peaceful slumber, just like falling asleep. He always imagined he would have had a lot to tell Kairi, when the time came, but now he finds that he had said all he could in the life they spent together; and now, now it's time to follow Riku into the Darkness again, like all these years before.

Sora smiles wider, feels Kairi squeeze his hand one last time, then his eyes drift closed.  
>He doesn't hear his wife and daughters sob at his loss, and slowly moves on, following the trail of light shining above him in the darkness. Somewhere far ahead, there is his new life.<p>

He has to choose wisely.

xXx

Somewhere along the way, while Sora's choosing his way to a next life, Roxas has emerged again. He walks alongside Sora in the darkness, speaks of a promise he made, begs in a quiet, almost monotone voice that still betrays an edge of panic; he recalls memories of red and fire in Sora's head, and Sora himself hasn't been dead for long enough to forget all about his last life. When Roxas speaks there is a faint urgency in his voice, like he's waited long enough, like he can't wait a moment more; and for every step closer to his new life that Sora takes, the frantic edge in Roxas' voice just grows. _I promised_, he begs, _I promised, he's searching for me_; and Sora swallows, bites his own cheeks hard enough to recall a faint feeling of pain even though he's got no body, because Roxas' desperation is strong enough to touch. _Let me go, Sora. Let me go,_ Roxas begs, _let me find him_.

Sora doesn't know what will happen if he lets a part of himself go, doesn't know if he'll be able to recognize Kairi or Riku in his next life, without Roxas, so he doesn't listen. Once he's picked his door, he stands in front of it, and his heart does bleed a little at Roxas' frenetic prayers. His Other's desperation for a broken promise is the last thing Sora hears, before he pushes the door to his next life open; a moment later, Sora has dragged Roxas with him and has fallen asleep in the subconscious of a creature developing in a woman's womb. He is a girl in his next life, finds a handsome man with strange ice coloured hair and eyes in college, falls madly in love. They get married, have a couple of very pretty kids, and for the longest time, Sora is a happy woman.

Until one day, in the library, she catches the eyes of a tall man with green eyes, and something inside her subconscious roars like a wounded tiger. The man walks up to her, a beam on his enchantingly handsome face, hands reached out in a strangely familiar gesture. Sora is frozen in shock and some incomprehensible nuance of pain, and doesn't react when he grabs her hands, whispering out a feverish _I found you_.

Then Sally comes back from the kids' shelves with the umpteenth Astrid Lindgreen book, tugs on her skirt and chirps _Can I take this one this week, mommy?_, and the spell is broken. The stranger looks down to Sora's baby girl with a frown of disbelief, then looks back up at her face looking all kinds of heartbroken. There's betrayal in his eyes, an unspoken scream of _Why_, and he lets Sora's hands go, swallows awkwardly. His eyes are oddly shiny when he speaks. _You haven't waited for me_. he says, and Sora doesn't know why, but something inside her is tearing her flesh apart at those words. She shrugs, shakes her head.  
><em>I'm sorry, sir, you must have confused me with someone else<em>, she says. _I've never seen you before._

The stranger seems to wobble a little under these words, and Sora just wants to take Sally and Miki and leave, go away where those green eyes cannot look at her like she just broke their heart, where she won't feel like dying under the weight of guilt she cannot even comprehend, and she gives a strained, kind smile. _Sir, are you okay?_she asks.

The man looks up again, swallows, and the pain in that green is so deep and excruciating that Sora's breath is cut short. _Yes, madam_, he answers emptily. Then he leaves without a word, and Sora spends the rest of her life having periodic nightmares in which the handsome stranger is crying in the darkness and she's behind a glass, pounding against it and calling, all in vain. The dream ends always in the same way, with the man fading into a black fog, and with her launching a blood-curdling scream of desperation. She jolts awake in her bed, Riku whispering soothingly in her ears, stroking her hair, while her children cry on the threshold and call _Mommy, mommy, are you sick? Are you okay?_

The next time Sora's eyes close forever, this last life's memories merge with the other lives' into the subconscious, and she finally understands everything.

When Roxas emerges from her, small boyish voice poisonous with anger and hurt, she doesn't have the heart to stop him. She has condemned him to eighty years of desperation, and she doesn't have the courage to do it again.

In the next life, Sora dies at three. In the one after that, Sora is a boy again, and marries a pretty red headed girl who gives him three children. When the kids are around ten, he meets a man with ice coloured eyes, and he falls in love. His family is devastated, but nothing, in that or in any of the lives that follow, ever hurts half as much as the betrayal he had seen in those green eyes did, god knows how many lives ago, in that library.

In his first next life, instead, Roxas is a boy.

xXx

People think that time is a linear sequence of events unfolding, from point A to point B. In people's head, time has a history: it started somewhere, unfolds in one only direction, and will eventually die in the same end as the universe itself. Once you die, people think, you can only move onwards.  
>In reality, time is a labyrinth. Whenever a living being dies, they are greeted by the darkness and follow a light trail that will bring them to the entry of the labyrinth itself. Some souls take just mere days to find an end, some can wander, lost into the darkness, for long enough to forget who they really are, and die forever. The vast majority of people search for their next life following the echoes of the steps of the loved ones that preceded them, to make sure to meet again. Most of them actually do, manage to be born in the same time – and maybe with some luck in the same place – as the person they're chasing; but sometimes lovers meet and don't recognize each other, because their love and their memories are buried in their subconscious, between countless memories of countless previous lives. Sometimes lovers die tangled together in Ancient Greece and meet again just one life later, on some spaceship cruising the starry skies of the Crab Nebula, and don't even grace each other with a second glance; yet, they're always drawn together, the ties between them and the memories of their past lives pulling them to meet again, and again and again and again, in the hope that someday a spark of recognition may ignite in either of them, and hands may find long forgotten paths over loved skin again.<p>

The first door Roxas opens as a standalone entity leads to the womb of an Austrian woman. He falls asleep in her bosom, ready to wake up as a premature baby boy in one rainy night of January.

Roxas isn't old when it happens. "There's a war," _vati_has said, "there's a war, son, and I need to go, but it won't be long. Look after your mother and your sister for me, until I come back."

Dad never comes back. He evidently didn't know what he was talking about, because he never comes back, and the war just keeps going and going. At a certain point, Roxas is called to arms as well. He's barely nineteen, still a child for the law, but he's given a helmet and a grey uniform, and sent to shoot on the Italian border. Nineteen sixteen hasn't faded into its twilight of blood yet, and Roxas can barely write, but his first Christmas has the taste of mud, boiled potatoes and rancid water that belong to the life in the trenches. He doesn't write about the lice to his mother, who was so proud of his beautiful golden hair, nor about the fleas that bite the flesh at any given moment. He doesn't write to his mother about the bombs going off around him all the time, nor does he write about the shrapnel that almost kills him, a few weeks into his fourth month of war.

Roxas is small, short and skinny, kind of frail, and of a sickly constitution. He shoots well, though, and he's good at guard duty. His rifle is nearly longer than he is, but he handles it with an ease that seems to suggest he was born fighting; when his captain compliments him, Roxas thinks of _vati_, and hurts a little. His father is dead and will never be back, and his mother is alone at home with Naminé; he misses the old fireplace, Naminé's delicious cakes, his mother's clean, crisp sheets.  
>He falls asleep on a flea infested pallet, hugging his rifle while his teeth rattle in cold, and every night feels like the last one.<p>

One night, around the end of nineteen seventeen, Roxas goes to sleep like every other night. He's not on duty, and he's very tired, very sleepy. There are movements in the darkness, something crawling through the no man's land taking advantage of the moonless night, and a second later the sky is burning. The rain of bombshell on Roxas' trench continue 'til morning, and at the end of the night there's nobody still standing.

Axel and his men slide down into the torn trench, sidestep the corpses and the fragments of bone and metal scattered around. They make sure nobody is still alive. He sends his men to control the whole length of the trench, standing in front of the corpse of a little soldier, still embraced to his rifle. He brushes bloody blond hair away from the childlike face, frowns without knowing why.

"Capitano, signore," one of his men calls out, "Abbiamo vinto."

Axel gives a nod, a long sigh. For a second he asks himself why he has followed his father to Italy at the beginning of the war, to serve under him in the military; but it's only a moment. Son to a general, this is his way, his glory. This is his future. There was never anything else.

Axel looks down to the face of the boy in front of him, nods again.

"Yes, soldier," he answers, "Abbiamo vinto."  
><em>We won.<em>

We won what?

xXx

The next time Roxas wakes up the sky is grey with the fumes of the factories lying around town. She's a pretty blonde, the third of seven kids, pure cockney breed. She's got small fingers, small hands, and her hands on the loom are quick and nimble when she begins working: she hasn't finished six years yet, after all, and it isn't long ago that she played with a ragdoll and a few stray cats in the street. Her mother and her siblings all work in the same factory, from dawn 'til dusk sitting in front of the same machines, making the same movements, over and over again. They arrive when the air outside is still damp, when the night's chill still hasn't faded, and Roxas still shivers a little bit in her miserable clothes.

They work wool, and Roxas' mother ties handkerchiefs around her children's mouth and nose before they get in, because the wool is everywhere. It makes Roxas' throat hoarse, a little sore, and her eyes itchy. It makes her fingers ache with the constant chafing, her skin burned under the never ending bite of the raw wool. Roxas doesn't like working, and sometimes cries because she can't play with her cat friends any more, because someone stole her ragdoll and all she has is the incessant noise of the mechanical looms, the acre smell of untreated wool and the bite of the loom on the tips of her fingers. Sometimes Roxas cries, sometimes she coughs, because the wool gets into her mouth; sometimes it chokes her a little, but if she stops she's going to get slapped, and if any of them loses their job the whole family will starve to death.

They all leave when the night shift comes in – the machines never sleep, the chimneys never stop vomiting their black poison – and nobody ever speaks much. When it's pay day, they collect their salary, then they leave. Sometimes, when they come in, there is a boy around twelve, thirteen years of age, sitting in a corner. He normally comes along with the owner's right hand man, on the inspection days, and sits in a corner while he waits for his father to finish his tour. He sits on a box and waits, his clothes good enough to stand out in a crowd, but still evidently not good enough for him to be the son of the owner of the factory, and stares bored at the workers looming the day away.

Roxas is around eight years of age when she notices that the boy is pretty, and even though she doesn't exactly know what a man and a woman are supposed to do to get married, she thinks she wouldn't mind marrying someone who's so good looking. She glances towards his side often, on the mornings he comes along, and thinks childishly that it would be beautiful if he saw her and commented _Hey, that is a pretty girl_. It would be nice if the boy – Axel, she's found out – knew her name, smiled at her every now and then. Sometimes, when she takes her lunch break, she fancies she had the courage to walk up to him and say hello, but she never does: she has little time before she needs to head back to her seat at the loom, and maybe Axel would be mean to her. She's working class, and the boy can actually write and read. He would probably consider her an impertinent, rude little girl, and call her names. She grows up to her early teens still wrapped in her one sided, silent crush, and watches him grow up to be a beautiful, stunning young man. He starts coming less and less, and Roxas hears he's working in the company offices, downtown. When she's fourteen she starts skipping masses to wander around his house, hoping to see him for a moment only; then when she loses her job she starts hanging around even when his working day finishes. Her heart hammers in her ears and her hands are freezing cold in nervousness while she tries to find the appropriate words to approach him, but somehow, she never comes up with anything better than _Hello, sir, I think you have the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen_; when he actually passes along, she always resolves to hiding somewhere.

Just once Roxas doesn't hide. She reaches a hand out to signal him to stop, and the man pushes a few coins on the palm of her hand without even looking at her face, walking past her distractedly.

Roxas looks at the coins in her hands and her eyes fill with tears of shame: shame for her poor clothes, shame for her cheeks hollowed by hunger, for the heavy breathing she owes to the looming machines. She swallows her pride, collects the pieces of her broken heart and leaves. She never goes to wait for Axel under his house again, and never hears of him again. She dies when she's forty five, married to a man she doesn't love that has made her life hell beating every cent of her poor new salary out of her, and the drunk figure of her husband isn't the one she hates the most when she fades.

She dies choking on her last breath, cursing the name of another man.

Roxas doesn't know that Axel died falling from a horse three weeks after that last meeting of theirs, and she doesn't know that, for those three weeks he'd been alive afterwards, he has wondered often where a certain blonde pretty beggar had ended up.

xXx

There's loud screaming in the air, and Roxas adjusts the kafiya over his mouth again, squinting his eyes to focus on the silhouettes flashing ahead and around him in the steam and in the smoke of the Molotov bottles burning in the streets. People are running back and forth, pacific demonstrators and rioters mixed and blended together, ground on all sides by the men in uniform come to sedate the rebellion. The police and the military have lasers and proton guns, while the demonstrators have only rocks and Molotov bottles to oppose, plus the few weapons here and there they have been able to steal from the Empire's forces. Ever since the end of the Fifth World War, weapons have been denied to the masses, and while at the beginning this was greeted as good news, with time the politics degraded, to the point of becoming barbarous again. Elections became rarer and rarer, and in the end democracy deteriorated to end up in an aseptic succession of power from the hands of a dictator to the hands of his protégé, and so on so forth.

As expected, the first to join in riots had been the students. There had been an explosion of fliers, pamphlets, underground assemblies in which boys and girls with too many dreams and too big eyes discussed and planned a future in which the power would end back in the hands of populations; there had been great movements in the high schools, in the universities, on the blogs and the social networking sites that constituted the fifth regeneration of the Internet. Kids exchanged letters, murmured and plotted in front of teachers who pretended not to see them, behind the shoulders of parents who didn't ask questions and protected them as best as they could. Not one of the older generations seemed to have the strength to make a move, but the vast majority of them looked at their beautiful, ferocious little children with a mix of fright – _Sora, Sora, my little, beautiful boy, what if they catch you? What if they find out?_– and pride in their eyes.

The movement – the boys and girls called themselves 'The Children of the New Dawn' – began to shape itself, grew underground, found somewhat a hierarchic form and began to actually plan the riots. Other planets in similar conditions began to look up to Earth's new warrior children, and the winds of rebellion began to travel all across the galaxy, infecting other planets, other races, and threatening new dictatorships.  
>That's where someone ratted the Children out.<p>

The first wave of the Children of the New Dawn was crushed one night of May, when hundreds of thousands of teenagers and young adult were forcibly torn away from their beds and annihilated in the main squares of the biggest city of the New Earth as an example for the entire Empire. While their parents cried and roared in the background, unarmed and powerless, the Children were conducted, fifty by fifty, on big marble stages that somewhat resembled sacrificial altars, and burned alive by the laser cannons of the Tyrants. The smell of burnt flesh and the ashes of those heroic children hovered across the cities for weeks afterwards, and for a while, nobody dared to speak a word about them. The name 'Children of the New Dawn' was banned, any memory of the boys and girls' existence was swept away and forbidden from being spoken ever again. With time, the Tyrant felt safe, as the riots blooming across the Empire were all smothered in blood just like on New Earth's.

What the Tyrants hadn't calculated, was that humans may be cowardly as long as they have a grain of hope, but they become unstoppable killing machines when they believe they've lost all. The second wave of the Children of the New Dawn was nurtured by the same people that had survived the first massacres, supported and educated by the men and women that had smelled their children's flesh and blood on the altars, and that had lost even the right to cry their beautiful little miracles on the comforting edge of a grave. The second wave of the Children of the New Dawn grew up nourished through whispers and hisses, learned to read on the Movement's new schemes, on their new plots. The Movement itself armed a series of stolen spaceships, little computer prodigies hiding the pirate ships from the Tyrants' radars, and a war was begun in the skies. While the second wave fought between stars and nebulas, the third wave prepared the attacks on the ground.

Finding weapons was still nothing short of impossible, but the Movement had time. For every hero that burned on the altars, seven new ones took place, immature faces hidden under the edges of scarves, kafiyas and hoods. They engaged battles at any chance they got, to the point that the police had orders to shoot kids point blank as they found them. Roxas was born while his aunt exploded just out of Pluto's skies, saw his mother burn when he was twelve. He's grown up in the war, has never known anything else. The Tyrants' empire has already begun to crumble when he's allowed to handle Molotov bottles and mix explosives, but the dictators ruling his world of flames and blood won't go down without a fight. Rather than giving up, they shall burn together with their young little enemies. The cities themselves end divided in Tyrants' territory and riot land, and the bombings from the sky every night reap more Children than the fights do.  
>Until the Children get a hold of an anti aircraft device, and the sides find a somewhat stable balance.<p>

Roxas adjusts the kafiya, lights the umpteenth Molotov and smirks a little under his breath. While the infantry battles in the street, the armed phalanxes are placing bombs under the palaces of the Power, and the juniors have infiltrated the empty barracks to steal weapons. Roxas' eyes squint for a second when he sees one: there is a skinny redheaded little thug running toward him, followed by seven military men. She can't be any older than sixteen, and is running under the weight of seven machine guns. If the juniors are already running the streets, the phalanxes must have placed the C4 already, and it's time to retreat. The girl is armed enough to kill her chasers, but she doesn't have enough vantage on them to be able to lay her foot down, turn around and shoot them to the ground.

"Duck, bitch!" he yells, and a moment later a dash of green meets his sight, and he's tossing the molotov. The girl jolts on a side, and from behind Roxas, Hayner and his squad are raining a hail of rocks on the soldiers. Axel grabs a hold of her, tugs her along to a safe street, shoves her in the open doors of an ally jeep that was waiting for them. The car starts with a roar, disappears in a few moments through a teleport door hidden in the wrecks of an old elementary school, and in a second they're safe, in a riot headquarters.

The girl hands Roxas the weapons, and Roxas blindly tosses them in the arms of some random passer by; probably their driver's, if he recognized the flash in his peripheral vision well. He leans down, hands on the sides of her face, knees between her thighs, and tilts his head. "You look like someone I knew." he murmurs, and it might be the adrenaline, it might be the sheer beauty of the girl resting under him, but he suddenly wants her very, very much. "What's your name?"

The girl sneers. "'Bitch', apparently," she answers, knees rising lazily until her feet are planted on the backseat just inches away from his knees. "You look like someone I'd fuck." she mocks, green eyes shining in the mockery of hunger for a second before she licks her lips.

Roxas has to let out a shuddery breath. "I'm about to do you on this backseat, Bitch," he hisses, and it doesn't register that they're in the middle of the garage, with mechanics and other rioteers passing them along out of the jeep; he doesn't realize that the girl's name isn't 'Bitch', either, and just pulls back to unfasten his jeans while the girl laughs with a silvery voice and pulls up the hems of her skirt.

Roxas does her in the backseat indeed, the girl's cries deafening in his ears as he pushes inside her, hard, fast, sweaty and messy and absolutely terrible because he's seventeen and has only done this a couple times, and _fuck_ this bitch is gorgeous and _shit_, in a moment he's coming. The girl tears at his hoodie, shakes under him, comes wailing loud while her heels drum against the small of his back. He does her again in his room, Pence spending the night somewhere else – who the fuck cares where – then does her in the shower and then back in his bed, until the girl hisses and scratches and "Enough, fucker, it kind of burns now."

They burn together less than three months later. Roxas is brought to the altar first, a couple batches before her, and the scream Axel lets out when he burns alive is a shriek that, for a moment, drowns out the sound of the explosions in the background.

xXx

Once back in the darkness, Roxas doesn't know which new life to pick. He half wants to wait for Axel, but he knows she won't appear out of nothing next to him, that's not how the labyrinth of time works. He sighs, tears stinging his eyes because he's just burned, so he knows how badly Axel will be suffering in the next minutes, and it tears him inside. He walks as slowly as he can, makes sure to leave a clear trace for Axel to follow, and when he opens the door to his next life, he prays to meet her just a little earlier, just to enjoy life with her a little better.

Roxas in the next life is a high class noble woman of ancient Rome, and Axel is a low life prostitute in the Forum's brothel. Roxas becomes wife to a rich centurion of Caesar's cohorts, Axel dies young in the hands of a rough customer. They never even cross paths.

Then Roxas is a young apprentice in the workshop of an Italian's painter, in Florence. Axel is the helper in a bakery store, and works at night. He lives three blocks away from Roxas' workshop, but they never meet.

The next time Roxas opens his eyes he's the third of eleven children. He ends up in the sea, deck boy to a pirate ship. Axel is on the ship as well, but he's forty five years older than Roxas in this life. He loves the kid as a son, and when he dies, Roxas doesn't understand why tossing him in the sea for his eternal slumber is so hard.

When Roxas is enrolled in the Federal army as a military doctor, he meets Axel again. A confederate cannon has blown his left leg off, and he dies in a few hours, delirious in pain and fever. Roxas doesn't know why, but when he sees him, Axel grabs his hand, crying "I found you, please don't leave me, I don't wanna lose you."  
>Roxas is an old doctor, has other patients to tend to, and this poor boy won't live for long, so he can't do anything for him. He disentangles his hand from the boy's and leaves.<br>He doesn't hear Axel call his name with his last breath.

Then Roxas is born again in Ireland, around the tenth century after Christ. She doesn't live long. Her mother and her are accused of witchcraft, and burned on a pyre when she's still twelve.  
>Axel watches from the crowd, green eyes wide. She doesn't know why, but she wants to cry out. She doesn't. She doesn't want to die as well.<p>

For a few lives, Roxas remains a boy. He goes to Princeton in the nineties of the twentieth century, never notices anything about the red headed librarian beyond the fact that she has tits to motorboat from here to eternity and legs to kill for, and doesn't remember that, at a Christmas party, Axel has blown him in the bathroom before letting him fuck her against the sink, eye liner smudging and green eyes staring at their reflection on the mirror. Roxas wakes up hungover the next morning, a used condom stuck to the right leg of his pants and a few red hair in the zipper.

During the French revolution, Roxas is a nobleman. Axel is a peasant. When the revolution strikes, he works the guillotine. When Roxas' head falls, Axel sticks it on the tip of a spear, idly considers that the little bitch was pretty, and hands the macabre trophy to someone else, kicking Roxas' corpse down the podium to make space for Marie Antoinette. When she steps on his foot, she apologizes.  
>Axel lets the guillotine fall with a sneer. When his queen's head rolls away, he laughs hatefully.<p>

During Enlightenment, Roxas is a simple carpenter. Axel, instead, works at the Encyclopedia with Diderot. They meet one day of August. Roxas fixes Axel's writing board, Axel pays him, then he bites his lower lip, murmurs something about seeing him somewhere before. It doesn't take much time before he's inside the young boy, hissing and pushing. Roxas comes back many other times, to pant and moan against the same writing board while Axel holds onto his hips and pushes inside him over and over.  
>When Roxas stops coming back, Axel figures the kid has found someone his age. It aches. He cries. Denis suggests him leaving, for a while. He can continue to work on the Encyclopedia alone, for a while.<br>Axel never comes back.  
>Roxas dies of tuberculosis three weeks after Axel leaves.<p>

Bohemian Paris is a cliché place and time for two lovers to meet again, and indeed they don't. Axel is a stunning young actress at a famous theatre downtown, Roxas is a poor philosopher. Axel eventually marries a rich merchant and cheats on him with whomever will ride her ass hard enough to make her scream; Roxas will die in a night of December, worn thin by hunger and cold. They never meet once in this life.

xXx

Roxas huffs, stretches his back. He looks ahead of himself in the terminal, sighs again. He missed the last ferry boat. How he's going to go back to Manhattan without it or any other mean of transportation, he has no idea. He knew he shouldn't have gone to that stupid art exhibition. Tracking down the author of a painting just because the man portrayed in it is outstandingly beautiful is a stupid idea, dreams or no dreams. He frowns, his chest hurting in a very uncharacteristic, incomprehensible way, and he shakes his head. The girl had been nice to him, "It's Axel," she had answered, "He should arrive, sooner or later. Hang around if you wanna talk to him, yes?"

And he had. He had hung around so much that he actually missed the last ferry boat, and the guy didn't show up. Naminé had given him Axel's number, but what could he do with it? _Hello, Axel, unknown random creeper here. My name? Oh, well. Not important. No, you don't know me, I found your number tracking down your ex, because, uh well, because I wanna suck your dick, man. Like, really bad. Like, I have had dreams about you ever since I was a child, you know, I'm kind of obsessed with you. Not in a dangerous way, you know. Just, if you don't mind, I'm going to shackle you to my bed and feed you only on energy drinks and Viagra for the rest of your life, so I can ride you til even your gums are numb forever. Oh no this is not creepy at all, I swear. I just really, really wanna suck your dick. You know. I am actually good at that and... oh? He hung up. Stuck up piece of shit._

Roxas lets his head hang low and sits down on a bench, reaching out for a cigarette. He remembers in a second moment that he's not supposed to smoke indoors and sighs again. He hums, tries to think what exactly he could do, but the truth is that he doesn't know. He hears steps behind his back, like someone is running up to him, and a wheezing sound comes closer. He turns around to see who the fuck is running, calling out "Too late, the ferry left," before his mouth catches up with what he sees. It's Axel. Piercings-everywhere-torn-denim-pants-leather-jacket-wearing Axel, a mane of red hair waving in the wind and green eyes wide, while the cold and the exertion have painted his cheeks a fierce red. Roxas' eyes widen and he swallows, jumping on his legs, unsure of why exactly, or of what to say. Axel catches up to him, breathless, panting and wheezing until he folds in two to collect his breath, sitting on his ass on the ground. Roxas moves closer cautiously, unsure whether he should be amused or search his pockets for his inhaler just in case the man of his dreams has in plan to die in front of his eyes of an asthma attack, and kneels down to check if Axel is okay.

He doesn't seem on the verge of dying just yet. "Dude, what?" he asks then, half confused half amused.

"Naminé..." Axel gasps out, his breath still too short for coherent speech, "Naminé said you were looking for me."

"And it was this important for you to find some random stranger who asked about you?" Roxas asks blinking a little.

The red on Axel's cheeks gets a tad darker, but the man snorts in amusement. "She told me who you were," he says without thinking. "And I'm a generous person. I'm Axel," he says, reaching a hand out for Roxas to shake.

Roxas takes it. "I know," he answers dumbly, and when Axel raises a brow he half feels like taking a dip into the dark water down at the docks. "Naminé told me."

"She said you asked her my number," Axel points out. "If you were any less pretty, or any more dangerous looking, I would consider that a pretty alarming fact."

"Your ex talks more than she should." Roxas mutters grumpily.  
>Axel snorts.<p>

"Joke's on you. Naminé speaks a maximum of seventy seven words a year." he points out.

They stay in silence for a while, and neither of the two is sure why they surprise themselves smiling at each other.

In the end, Axel swallows. "You look like someone I knew." he says. Those words for some reason don't sound new to Roxas, and he smiles.

"That sounds like something I would say." he answers.

Axel smiles. "Maybe you did." he says. "You look like something I loved."

Roxas' breath catches and his chest constricts in a painful, beautiful way. He gives a sad smile. "We never met before, Axel." he points out.

Axel shakes his head. "What do you know." he mutters. Then he looks up. "You look like something I lost."

This isn't possible, this isn't supposed to ache so much, it isn't supposed to be so bad and so good and _goddamnit_, after all he just wants to fuck this dude, fuck him until he can't think straight and has forgotten any word that isn't Roxas' name. "I wanna suck your cock." he blurts out, right before he grimaces at his own words, because _fuck blondie way to ruin the fucking mood_; and Axel is laughing a moment later, laughing with his eyes closed and his mouth wide open, laughing with his head thrown back, laughing so much that Roxas is half afraid he'll fall backwards if he keeps up. Axel laughs until he's crying, wiping off tears of amusement even as each new fit of laughter starts. Roxas would be ashamed, at least a little, but he can't, he just can't because maybe Axel's right and they loved each other before, lost each other before, and even if they didn't who the fuck cares. He waits for Axel's laughing fit to fade, and unconsciously crawls closer. He smiles when Axel finishes wiping his eyes and jolts a little, surprised at seeing him so close, and asks: "Why did you run here?"

Axel takes a deep breath. Then he looks up, worrying his lower lip between his teeth like he's searching the words. Then he sighs and shakes his head, giving up. "Say, Roxas," he asks, "Do you ever dream?"

Roxas beams, crawls closer before he's even found out if the man swings that way or not, and as their lips touch he's straddling Axel's thighs. They kiss until the breath breaks, until stomachs churn and hands push their way under clothes, kiss until the head spins, until pants get tight. Axel pushes Roxas down onto the ground, and Roxas would complain about it if he gave just half a fuck. "I found you," Axel urges out, breath broken and eyes shiny, and Roxas would like to answer _I love you oh my god I found you Axel I've waited for you so long, I searched for you so long, I found you I found you I found you oh my god don't leave me_, but it would make no sense, for he's known this man for half an hour at best, so how can he say he's waited long for him? Axel kisses him again, feverish and desperate and needy and another million things, and Roxas isn't sure any more for how long he's known Axel for real. It feels longer. It feels like forever, like more than one lifetime, and maybe that's what eternity tastes like. "I've looked everywhere for you." Axel whispers against Roxas' lips, and Roxas isn't sure but there might be crying in his voice.

Roxas tries to find the words, tries to fish them from his memories, anything that gives this entire absurdity even just a grain of sense, and as if he called it there's the memory of that dream, the dream that haunted him since childhood. Axel dressed in black, fading in a black fog, and a promise he couldn't keep.

Axel is laughing against his lips again, and Roxas snorts and asks why. "This shit makes no sense, man," Axel answers between laughter, and Roxas laughs back. Then, he shrugs. That's not true. It makes perfect sense, if he thinks about it.

"Say, Axel." he calls out softly, "_Do you ever dream_?


End file.
